[Air-l] How Much Information / Information Growth

[William Bain]

Alexander Semenov wrote: 
   
  "But my idea was that perhaps this division is somehow connected with modernity. I think, that analogy with leading idea of Georg Simmel's "Philosophy of money" could be very fruitful and interesting. Or it can be connected with processes of rationalization in Max Webers sence. What do you think?"
   
  Jose-Carlos Mariategui wrote:
   
  "There are other ways of approaching the concept of information. Of course digital data is one of them and that is what I referred when I mentioned the Lyman and Varian 2003 study.  The work of Shannon is a much more engineering-based approach that does not cknowledge information as meaning or content, but as discrete syntactic information (information
through a channel).... I am basically trying to look upon research being done in how to
approach the quantification and qualification of information available today in the world."

   
  I like what both of you are saying, as it helps my own perspective. I don't think I can add much more just now but I wanted to say that maybe the modernism connection comes in part from Bertrand Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. He calls the acquaintance type applicable to our knowledge of things and roughly equates it with the French verb connaitre or the German verb kennen. The description type he equates roughly with French savoir or German wissen. Russell says knowledge by description is basically a knowledge of truths. So I accept what you're saying but wanted to put this in somewhere. I'm not familiar with Simmel and only "by description" with Weber (well, a little more, but I still have that debt).
   
  Best wishes, Will
  
 


William Bain
PhD Student
Comparative Literature
Department of Spanish Philology
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
 
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